Bambi first appeared in serialized form in Vienna’s stately paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. The book version appeared in 1923, and by then the story had established itself as one that appealed to adults and children alike. The American edition was so hotly anticipated that the fledgling Book of the Month Club ordered 50,000 copies before it had even appeared. Translated into English by Whittaker Chambers, of all people, and published in the United States in 1928, the novel was both a critical and commercial success.

One American reviewer deemed it to be as “profoundly pertinent to the modern experience as The Magic Mountain,” and it impressed more than a few influential readers. Among these was the producer and director Sidney Franklin, who bought the film rights to Bambi in 1933—for $1,000. His plan was to adapt the book to the screen as a live nature film, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Eventually, he sold the rights to Walt Disney, who, with his visceral dislike of hunting, had been genuinely moved by Salten’s novel.

Of course, that didn’t stop Disney from transforming the story Bambi tells. Captiousness, melancholy, and a sentimental streak count among the prominent characteristics of Salten’s animals. The animals in the Disney film, which premiered in 1942, are altogether more frolicsome, brash, and affable. The plucky rabbit Thumper, for example, is Disney’s creation, not Salten’s. In the film, more than in the book, the forest, while no Eden, has an initial tranquility that is shattered by the cruelty of man. Indeed, some viewers regarded the film as registering the trauma of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the loss of America’s innocence. Salten, nevertheless, liked the film, though he always described it as “Disney’s Bambi.” What distressed him were the terms of his contract. In 1941, Salten, whose works had long been banned in Germany, complained, “I have been delivered over to Disney with my hands and feet fettered and a gag in my mouth.” Salten’s heirs would fare no better. In 1996, a senior district judge in California wrote that, “Bambi learned very early in life that the meadow . . . was full of potential dangers everywhere he turned. Unfortunately, Bambi’s creator, Mr. Salten, could not know of the equally dangerous conditions lurking in the world of copyright protection.”

Despite the fact that Salten’s Bambi appeared just before his book about Palestine, critics have hardly ever discussed Bambi in the context of his Zionism. They have spent more energy tracking the affinities between Bambi and Josefine Mutzenbacher (beginning with the mockers who ridiculed the sensual moments in the former book as the work of a “deer sodomite”). Which isn’t to suggest that critics have spent that much energy on Salten. He is a little like Max Brod: principally known now for the people he knew. Because of his role in important literary networks, as well as his enormous output, his name comes up a lot, but even his own literary friends—Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal—had their doubts about the seriousness of his efforts.

If the scholarly discussion of Salten’s works were larger, it is likely that we would have detailed interpretations of Salten’s animal stories as allegories of the Jewish experience. For they do lend themselves to such readings, even if Salten didn’t play as much or as artfully as Kafka did with the longstanding associations in German culture between Jews and certain animals (mice, monkeys). Consider The Hound of Florence, another work by Salten that has had an afterlife in American popular culture: It was—and was formally credited as being—the inspiration for Disney’s The Shaggy Dog film franchise. This semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of an artist who must spend every other day in aristocratic society as a dog. A central theme of the novel (and needless to say entirely lost in the Disney films) is the outsider as abject insider.

Much more central in the animal stories, however, is the theme of persecution. It was Karl Kraus who first linked this to Salten’s Jewish background, though not in the way you might expect, especially given that Kraus was writing just after the Nazi Party had achieved mainstream success. Writing about a Bambi spin-off in 1930, Kraus claimed to detect the sound of Jewish dialect—or “jüdeln”—in the speech of Salten’s hares. Salten was a hunter (a humane one, he always insisted), and, as it happened, he had just published a piece about his love of hunting. Kraus joked that Salten’s hares had adopted a Yiddishy tone of voice in order to blend in with a special type of enemy—the Jewish hunter. The hares were “perhaps using mimicry as a defense against persecution.” When Salten died in 1945, an American critic found a more straightforward connection between the plight of some animal characters and that of the Jews. In his obituary for Salten, the critic, having noted Salten’s “Zionist sentiments,” maintained that the fox in Bambi not only comes across as the rapacious “Hitler of the forest,” but also has a mentality of hatred and rage that bears similarities with Goebbels’ anti-Semitism.

It was not until a decade ago, however, that an actual reading of the “Zionist overtones” in Bambi was proposed. In an essay published in 2003, Iris Bruce argues broadly that the novel evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.” But she also pays close attention to its language. Salten’s suggestive phrase for butterflies is “wandering flowers,” and Bambi describes them elsewhere as “beautiful losers” who have to keep moving, “because the best spots have already been taken.” Bruce stresses, as well, that the culture of the deer develops around the fact of their victimization: They tell their children tales that “are always full of horror and misery.”